Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality.

• Author: Bates, David

Nelson, Bruce. Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. xliv + 388 pages. Paperback, $45.00.

In his authoritative introduction to Divided We Stand, historian Bruce Nelson explains that his book was a response to two parallel currents in American labor history. The first, led by Herbert Hill and Nell Irvin Painter, among others, insisted that the so-called New Labor History had (literally) whitewashed the study of American workers by ignoring the importance white racism and the agency of Black workers in the formation of the American working class. The second, led by David Roediger, proposed whiteness as a key component of American racial and working-class formation. It is difficult to imagine today, in an era when race is a vital level of analysis for labor historians and terms such as "white privilege" have entered common parlance, how rancorous were the debates over these issues. Painter and (especially) Hill famously took to task leading lights of American labor history, including Herbert Gutman, David Montgomery, and Nelson Lichtenstein. Whiteness, meanwhile, was widely derided as a concept too insubstantial to gain traction in social history.

Nelson's innovation was to examine the growth of whiteness and the marginalization of Black workers not as discrete phenomena, but inextricably interconnected. Most critically, Nelson argues that the agency of workers, both white and Black, has long been overlooked in our study of race and labor. White workers were not duped into antiblack racism by the divide-and-conquer tactics of employers; nor were Black workers bribed into skepticism of unions by corporate paternalism. Rather, white workers took an active, if halting and uneven, role in defining themselves as white and in marginalizing their Black colleagues, while Black workers combatted such oppression with every weapon at their disposal.

Divided We Stand is split into two halves, with the first examining dockworkers and the second examining steelworkers. In each, Nelson offers a powerful analysis of the processes by which working-class immigrants--Irish in dockworking, southern and eastern Europeans in steel--became white. Critically, Nelson's analysis of whiteness is centered on the concrete material advantages it conferred. On the docks, for example, kinship networks afforded the Irish enormous advantages at the "shape-ups" that determined the day's work, while...